"I could not bear to refuse her," the mother wrote to me later. "I let her go. I feared that it would only make her feel her lameness the more keenly and be a source of distress to her. But it isn't; she enjoys it. She cannot even try to learn to dance; but she takes pleasure in being present and watching the others, to say nothing of wearing a 'dancing- school dress,' as they do. This morning she said to her father: 'I can't dance, Papa; but I can talk about it. I learn how at dancing-school. Oh, I love dancing-school!'"
Her particular accomplishment maybe of minute value in itself; but is not her content in it a priceless good? If she can continue to enjoy learning only to talk about the pleasures her lameness will not permit her otherwise to share, her dancing-school lessons will have taught her better things than they taught "the other children," who could dance.
That mother was her little girl's confidential friend as well as her mother. The child, quite unreservedly, told her what she wanted and why she wanted it. It was no weak indulgence of a child's whim, but a genuine respect for another person's rights as an individual—even though that individual was merely a little child—that led that mother to allow her daughter to have what she wanted. May not some subtle sense of this have been the basis of the child's happiness in the fulfillment of her desire? She wanted to go to dancing-school because the other children were going; but may she not have liked going because she felt that her mother understood and sympathized with her desire to go?
A Frenchwoman to whom I once said that American parents treat their children in many ways as though they were their contemporaries remarked, "But does that not make the children old before their time?"
So far from this, it seems, on the contrary, to keep the parents young after their time. It has been truly said that we have in America fewer and fewer grandmothers who are "sweet old ladies," and more and more who are "charming elderly women." We hear less and less about the "older" and the "younger" generations; increasingly we merge two, and even three, generations into one.
Only yesterday, calling upon a new acquaintance, I heard the four-year- old boy of the house, mentioning his father, refer to him as "Henry."
His grandmother smiled, and his mother said, casually: "When you speak of father, dear, it would be better to say, 'my father,' so people will be sure to know whom you mean. You may have noticed that grandma always says, 'my son,' and I always say 'my husband,' when we speak of him."
"Does he call his father by his Christian name?" I could not resist questioning, when the little boy had left the room.
"Sometimes," replied the child's mother.
"He hears so many persons do it, he can't see why he shouldn't. And there really is no reason. Soon enough he will find out that it isn't customary and stop doing it."